Generics CLS Compliant in Whidbey

Generics CLS Compliant in Whidbey

[Update: This article was meant to be titled GreatNews<GenericsClsCompliance> but something in the XML pipeline is objecting to my using <> signs in the title!!]

Brian (good find, mate!) pointed out the breaking news story that generics will be CLS compliant in Whidbey. That’s very cool news! I was living and loving generics last summer, always feeling a little guilty about not being able to tag my assemblies as CLS Compliant until Orcas, the follow-on to Whidbey.

The move makes a lot of sense to me. I have always considered .Net 2.0 language enhancements like generics to be part of the Whidbey “wave” of technologies, not the subsequent Longhorn wave. I know this raises the stakes in the short term for CLS language implementers, but I reckon those people are pretty smart anyways so they’ll sort something out ;)

Peter Drayton’s BCLTeam blog entry (linked above) is a very good read, and so are the articles he references, particularly if you’re curious about the decision-making process for a move like this, the CLS notions of consumers, extenders and frameworks, or just generally how the multi-language support works.

[Aside: I met some of the crew responsible for the CLR generics implementation at Microsoft Research in Cambridge. One of them had a mug inscribed Cup<Tea>. I chuckled. They knew I was a geek. And we all had a little moment.]